Turn-by-Turn Navigation – the Best Way to Guide Pedestrians?

Navigating from a place to another is an essential ability for a self-determined life. When navigating in unknown terrain, e.g. when going for a hike or when visiting a city as a tourist, people become increasingly dependent on navigation aids. Established aids range from signposts over maps to route descriptions. But, thanks to the increasing number of GPS-enabled mobile phones, a new navigation aid is becoming increasingly common: the GPS navigation system.

In principle, these systems behave like car navigation systems. The traveller’s location is displayed on a map, the route is highlighted, and turning instructions are given by symbols or speech. For cars, this way of guiding the driver has shown to be quite successful. Timely and accurate instructions are indispensable as the driver has to follow the traffic rules. For pedestrians, however, this type of information presentation may be too strict. Even worse, when providing too much navigation information, we neglect the human’s inherent navigation abilities and cause even disadvantages. For example, many people report that when driving a route by navigation systems, they cannot remember the route as well as they could before the area of car navigation systems.

Now just imagine a place that is roughly 1 mile away from your current location. If somebody would give you the rough cardinal direction of this place on demand, most people would reach it easily. We tested this kind of navigation in research group and currently offer it in the PocketNavigator. First, the user specifies the destination by selecting it on a map. The handheld then creates vibration patterns that indicate whether the destination is ahead, to the left-hand side, or to the right-hand side.

First studies show that pedestrians can effectively and efficiently navigate with such as directional cue only. Thus, showing the direction of a destination “as the crow flies” could be a valuable additional to turn-by-turn navigation systems for pedestrians.